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Remote corner of Nevada ranked among world's darkest spots

Drone aerials shot at Donner Lake, Emerald Bay and at the Summit of the Mt. Rose Highway on March 4 show the beautiful aftermath of record-setting snowfall at Lake Tahoe and on the surrounding mountains.
Reno Gazette-Journal

Nevada's Massacre Rim to join list of Dark Sky Sanctuaries in New Mexico, Texas, Utah, New Zealand and Chile

Computer scientist Chris Schmandt doesn’t visit Nevada for the casinos, but he does appreciate the state’s nightlife.

Schmandt, of Boston, prefers to go beyond the glowing reach of lights in Las Vegas and Reno to relax in the most remote corners of the state.

“I’m one of those people who thinks about what the world was like before electricity,” said Schmandt, who noticed Nevada’s dark night skies while poring over satellite images depicting the spread of light pollution across North America.

Workers from Friends of Nevada Wilderness survey the night sky from the Massacre Rim Wilderness Study Area on July 14, 2018.(Photo: Kurt Kuznicki/Contributed photo)

“I was looking for places to go and NASA has a nice composition image of the Earth at night from space,” Schmandt said. “I figured the dark places were places where there weren’t a lot of people. And there is a lot of dark in Nevada.”

Soon, people won’t have to search satellite photos to learn about Nevada’s position among the best places for night sky enthusiasts to escape light pollution.

That’s because a remote area in the northwest corner of the state is poised to become just the seventh spot on the planet to be designated a Dark Sky Sanctuary.

The designation for the Massacre Rim area in northern Washoe County will be just the fourth sanctuary of its kind in the United States and the first in Nevada.

“I figured the dark places were places where there weren’t a lot of people. And there is a lot of dark in Nevada”

Chris Schmandt, night sky enthusiast

Other U.S. dark sky sanctuaries include Cosmic Campground in New Mexico, Rainbow Bridge National Monument in Utah and Devils River-State Natural Area Del Norte in Texas. There are also sanctuaries outside the U.S. in New Zealand and Chile.

“This designation literally puts Washoe County on the Dark Sky map,” said Shaaron Netherton, executive director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness, a group that led the charge for the designation. “We are just thrilled that this special place has been recognized for its natural values.”

Friends of Nevada Wilderness announced the designation Saturday.

The designation shows the International Dark Sky Association, founded in 1988 in Tucson, Ariz., considers the area to have "exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights and a nocturnal environment" and should remain protected for scientific, ecological and cultural benefit.

Research shows artificial light can disrupt wildlife which depend on natural cycles of light and darkness for everything from hunting to sleeping to migration.

Skies unpolluted by artificial light, which are rare throughout much of the world, also provide a glimpse at the way the sky and landscape would have looked to people throughout the majority of humans' time on the planet.

"The sky ruled more of your life than it does now," Schmandt said.

Stars reflect off water flowing to the ephemeral Massacre Lake in the Massacre Rim Wilderness Study Area.(Photo: Kurt Kuznicki/Contributed photo)

It won’t change any access rules or regulations for Massacre Rim, a designated wilderness study area of 101,000 acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management about 150 miles north of Reno and 160 miles east of Redding, Calif., near the borders of Nevada, California and Oregon.

But it will elevate its profile as a destination for people who want to experience solitude and starlight the way humans would have experienced it before electricity and industrialization.

“The sanctuary designation is for places that have extremely dark skies,” said Adam Dalton, the association’s Dark Sky Places program manager. “Sanctuaries not only are dark but are really remote.”

BLM spokesman Jeff Fontana said the agency wrote a letter of support for the designation in 2016.

“It is something magical to drive around the WSA at night”

Kurt Kuznicki, Friends of Nevada Wilderness

To achieve the designation, workers from Friends of Nevada Wilderness had to document the darkness of the sky using objective measurements.

The group, which advocates on behalf of wilderness designations in the state, sent workers into the field on several nights in April and July of 2018.

They drove around the fringe of the area by 4x4 and hiked into the interior and used light-measuring instruments to capture readings to show how the look of the sky rated on the Bortle Scale, a nine-point system that measures the visibility of stars and other natural light in the night sky.

“It is something magical to drive around the WSA at night,” said Kurt Kuznicki, associate director of Friends who helped take readings. “You start drinking coffee at 10 o’clock at night and drive around listening to the radio.”

Morning light begins to spill across the night sky at 4:17 a.m. on May 2, 2017, in the Massacre Rim Wilderness Study Area in Nevada.(Photo: Kurt Kuznicki/Contributed photo)

They documented qualities such as the ability to see distinct features of the Milky Way, entities such as the M33 galaxy and natural starlight bright enough to cause objects to cast shadows.

Their findings showed the area ranked at the top of the Bortle Scale and worthy of the Dark Sky Sanctuary designation.

Kuznicki said visiting Massacre Rim at night reminded him of hiking into the Golden Trout Wilderness in the Eastern Sierra with his dad in the early 1970s.

It was on those trips from Long Beach, where Kuznicki was raised, that he gained an appreciation for escaping light pollution that prevents people in urbanized areas from the primeval experience of a pure night sky.

“I would like to see folks appreciate the resource they have in northern Washoe,” Kuznicki said. “Right in our backyard we have these special places and we have the opportunity to protect it right now.”